Iran Raises Rhetoric Against Israel

By

Benoît Faucon in London and

Joshua Mitnick in Tel Aviv

Updated Oct. 8, 2012 5:54 p.m. ET

Iran accused Israel of launching cyberattacks on its oil facilities and derided the Jewish state's air defenses, although it didn't take responsibility for a drone that entered the Jewish state's airspace Saturday before Israel shot it down.

Tehran's comments Monday came as political pressure inside Iran rises over the country's fragile economy, partly the result of Western sanctions against its nuclear program. Lawmakers, which has been sparring with President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
over a range of issues, said they would try to require him to testify over Iran's economy in the coming weeks.

ENLARGE

An Israeli military helicopter landed in southern Israel this week, days after the Air Force shot down a drone.
Reuters

Tehran has grappled with an acute currency crisis since last week, when the long-dipping Iranian currency, the rial, began to plunge. On Sunday, parliamentarians lambasted President Ahmadinejad for a 25% drop in the rial's value against the dollar in the prior week. Mr. Ahmadinejad blames currency speculation and the economic sanctions.

Some analysts said the accusations against Israel could be the regime's attempt to provide a distraction from internal political wrangling and deflect attention from its domestic problems.

"Iran has lost control of its currency," said Cliff Kupchan, a director at the Eurasia Group, a New York-based risk consultancy. So the government's "talking point in the morning is about what the scapegoat of the day is."

"They are worried that their deterrence has been eroded," said Meir Javedanfar, an Iran analyst at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center, an Israeli college and research center. He said that if the drone was sent by Hezbollah, Iran's ally in Lebanon, it shows a "measured" response to the pressure. "They are being careful not to start a war."

Mohammad Reza Golshani, head of information technology at the state-owned Iranian Offshore Oil Co., told the Mehr news agency in Iran on Monday that there has been "a new cyberattack on the information system of offshore facilities in the past few weeks," referring to an oil platform. He said Iran repelled the attack.

Mr. Golshani, who didn't respond to a request for comment, told Mehr that "an examination of the attacks showed they had been planned by the Zionist regime"—his term for Israel—"and several other countries."

Computer viruses have hit Iran's nuclear program and key government offices, including the oil ministry in the past. But disruption to Iran's strategic oil output—a key source of revenue—would be another serious setback, coming after Iran's exports have sharply declined amid escalating sanctions.

Israel and the U.S. have reportedly initiated prior computer intrusions, though neither has confirmed nor denied responsibility for the computer attacks.

Meanwhile, a top military commander in Tehran on Monday insisted Israel's air defenses were weak. Saturday's drone incursion into Israel shows the country's Iron Dome anti-missile defense system "is ineffective," said Jamaluddin Aberoumand, a deputy coordinator for Iran's elite military unit, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, whose remarks were carried by the semi-official Fars news agency. He called Israeli speculation that Iran was behind the drone a "psychological operation."

Some Israeli politicians and analysts speculated that the aircraft was launched by Hezbollah.

A spokesman for the Israeli Defense Force said the military began tracking the drone while it was over the Mediterranean, as it entered Israeli-controlled airspace in Gaza, and in Israel's own airspace before the Israeli Air Force shot it down over an unpopulated area near Yatir, at the southern tip of the West Bank.

The Israeli Defense Force would not comment on the route of the drone while in Israeli airspace, about who sent the drone or who made the drone, except to say that it didn't originate in Gaza. The spokesman declined to comment on Iran's allegation that the drone evaded the Iron Dome system.

Separately, the Israeli Defense Force traded strikes with militants Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Dozens of rockets and mortars were fired into southern Israel on Monday, and several Gazans were injured in Israeli retaliatory strikes.

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